The goal of this activity is to explore spaces, services, and information literacy (IL) concepts through problem-based scenarios, guided discovery, and peer teaching. Ideal for orientations for K-12, undergraduate, transfer, or graduate students, but can also be used for instruction requests with no clear research assignment or at the start of a research project. Students work in groups to find solutions to a scenario using guided directions and tools, and then teach the rest of the class based on their findings. The activity takes approximately 30-45 minutes, including student presentations, depending on class size and complexity of scenarios.

This is a participatory, variable lesson frame ready for you to modify to suit your instruction needs. This lesson and it's variations focuses on encouraging students to see themselves as information creators and part of the scholarly conversation and can also variously include conversations about about the scholarly information cycle and/or authority depending on instruction constraints and configuration.

This activity provides an interactive, student-centered, fun opportunity to explore skills of critical thinking and evaluation of resources. By allowing students to connect those things that they already know (even if they don’t know they know it) to larger concepts, we encourage them to trust themselves and to begin to develop their intuition as scholars, moving away from checklists and formulas for resource evaluation and toward a thoughtful critique of sources based on individual need and use.

A scholarly character sheet for self-assessment about information literacy skills - gamification around quantified self, badging and young researcher identity.

Une feuille d'autoévaluation pour suivre les apprentissages en compétences informationnelles acquises sur le moyen ou le long terme. Elle est ludifiée avec des éléments de mesure de soi, de badge et d'identité de jeune chercheur.

Comment envoyer une minorité d'étudiants surmotivés sur des objectifs pédagogiques intégrés et connexes dont le parcours est structuré ?
1) Faire une courte introduction engageante (15min.)
2) Identifier la minorité surmotivée et leur distribuer un parcours.
3) Assurer une supervision mininal avec un suivi distant et ponctuel au besoin.
Avec 2 exemples de parcours: une auto-initiation en 5 niveaux pour contribuer à Wikipédia; et un programme de 12 semaines pour démarrer un blogue sur un sujet de recherche.

How to get the few really motivated students involved? By asking them to fulfil « side-quests » learning activities in a structured itinerary :
1) Present a short but engaging initiation [sur quoi?] (15 min.) ;
2) After identifying the motivated students, give them a formal checklist [pour quoi?];
3) If needed, provide minimum mentoring and follow-up
Here are two examples : 5-steps self-initiation on how to contribute to Wikipedia and 12-weeks program to start a blog on research topic.

The purpose of this activity is to inspire students to adopt structured methods when they explore and retrieve information. It is based on lab notebooking methods and on managing and documenting the flow of references in Zotero, a reference management software.

The first principle is based on a tree of collections to manage the references arriving in the Zotero library. Some basic methods are suggested and the students are invited to create their own. The second principle is based on standalone notes to document all the research process through online database, libraries and experts.

Environmental science students critically analyzed the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) website and its treatment of climate change during the Trump, Obama, and Bush presidencies. This library “warm-up” activity was designed to raise awareness of data fragility and the long-term accessibility of government websites. As future science professionals, it’s important to think about how this impacts scientists and their work. Students were introduced to several tools including: The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, End of Term Archive, and Data Refuge. What happens when government web pages are hidden, moved, or deleted?

This is designed to introduce students to the wonderful world of periodicals, in their great variety, and to how they will appear in different databases. It also begins the work of building their skills at evaluating information sources, determining perspective.